Thatcher (May79 – Sep14) – give her a good send off

Margaret Thatcher (3 May 1979 – 18 September 2014).

Let’s give her a good send off!

Thatcher meant a lot of things to a lot of people.  To me, when she came to power on 3 May 1979 she immediately introduce the ‘ME, ME, ME’ society to the UK.  ‘I’m all right, Jack’ quickly became the new UK mantra.

She came from a retail background, sales if you will, and her skill was to sell the concepts that promoted her political vision.  Because of her background, she wanted to turn Britain into a nation of shopkeepers.  Thank God her father was not a fireman.

She pretty much succeeded in her pursuit.  But at what a cost!  In Scotland her one (wo)man crusade wiped out Scotland’s world class industrial base; shipbuilding, heavy engineering, coal, steel manufacturing, locomotives, cars, sewing machines to name just a few.  Of course these industries were in trouble, of course they were needing support, they were crying out for it in a changing world.  If that is not part of the job of Government to support the country’s struggling industries then what is?  Thatcher delivered the ‘coup de grace’ over and over again in pursuit of her ideology.

But, don’t let’s be fooled into thinking that Thatcher was a formidable adversary for the country’s blue collar workers.  She certainly was not – that would be giving her too much credit.  She simply ‘cherry picked’ other people’s ideas and policies she could exploit for her self promotion and vision for her London and the South East.

One great example of her exploitation is ‘Right to Buy’.  This is a policy associated with Thatcherism that actually had little to do with her.  She simply used it or exploited it as a blunt instrument to manipulate ordinary people.  This is the policy where sitting tenants have the ‘Right to Buy’ their council house at a substantial discount dependant on certain conditions.  This could as much as 60% discount on a house of 70% on a flat.

Many people believe, and I include myself, that in converting council tenants into owner/occupiers Thatcher was trying to create a vast pool of new Tories.  She didn’t.  Of course there are always a few ‘upyourselves’ with delusions of grandeur but in fact Thatcher was promoting selfish values in people with her covert ideal to destroy socialism.

She did not destroy socialism.  In fact she left that for her star pupil, Tony Blair to do in 1997.  In fact, Thatcher actually was destroying social values.  That is substantially more destructive in a society.

But surely it was Thatcher who introduced ‘Right to Buy’?  Actually, it was not.  In fact, this was a LABOUR PARTY manifesto pledge from the 1959 general election that Labour lost.  However, the idea was out there and it was not long before a certain Tory, Greater London Council housing chief, Horace Cutler introduced ‘Right to Buy’ in London in the late 60’s. [read about it]

Thatcher simply seized the principal of ‘Right to Buy’, recognised how she could use it to manipulate people for her own ends and created a feeding frenzy of council house buyers and future Conservatives.

Don’t imagine for a minute that Thatcher knew what she was doing.  She did not.  She knew what she was trying to do but she was clueless as to the potential  consequences of her naivety.

This is not a detailed appraisal of ‘Right to Buy’.  There are plenty of great articles that examine this in much more detail.  I simply want to point out some of the consequences of ‘Right to Buy’ that were avoidable and about which Thatcher would have been forewarned.  The rest of us have the benefit of hindsight.

Selling off council houses generates revenue for the local authorities who can then replace their stock with new affordable homes.  This stimulates the construction industry.  BUT THAT SIMPLY DID NOT HAPPEN and affordable homes became more and more scarce.

Private developers grabbed a stranglehold of the ‘Right to Buy’ sector squeezing revenue out of local authorities and into the greedy ‘mits’ of an insurgence of micro-capitalist.

With local authorities starved of funds the maintenance of remaining housing stock was under serious pressure and the quality of social housing was on a downward spiral, from which it has never recovered.

WITNESS WHERE WE ARE TODAY WITH COUNCIL PROPERTIES AND AFFORDABLE HOMES

From my own perspective, and I was one of those greedy little buggers who made a few quid out of the scheme, council housing morph’d into ghettos.  When I was a wee boy we had a top floor tenement flat because we were immigrants with insufficient points to qualify for a Corporation house.

My dad was a child victim of polio and had a heart attack while still a young man.  My mum was nobody’s fool and forsook her Maryhill roots by joining the Tory party in Yoker, stumped up quite a bit of ‘key money’ and secured us a masionette in Knightswood.

This was like gold dust, she told us.  Her motives were entirely honourable and we thanked our lucky stars. It surely saved my dad who could no longer climb many flights of stairs.

At that time, Glasgow was awash with Corporation housing estates and schemes.  Knightswood was one of the best with Mosspark in the southside and there were many others.  ‘Corpy’ tenants could build up points, grow their families, look for swaps and progress from one Corporation area to another moving up the housing ladder and improving their lot.

That all changed with ‘Right to Buy’.  Nobody would part with one of the up market ‘Corpy’ houses in Knightswood for example.  In fact, the people in Knightswood were the ones most likely to be able to afford to buy their house, and they mostly did, over the years.  This meant that the areas people aspired to, were no longer available.  If you lived in a tenement in Yoker you stayed in Yoker.  The cottage areas with big gardens were no longer a prospect, almost no matter how long you waited.  Actually, my aunt Isobelle lived in a flat in Scotstoun.  She had the points for a move to Knightswood.  She eventually got a move more than 25 years later!

This whole council house aspiration and progression by geography and house type was an early casualty of ‘Right to Buy’.

Just as a footnote, before I come to my point. There has been a good outcome for some of those ghettos.  No thanks to Thatcher or her policies.  Over the years and thanks to people like John Butterley and the Social Housing Association in Duke Street, Dennistoun, many of those ‘ghettos’ have resurrected themselves into proud, highly sought after areas.  This is because you cannot keep a good Scot down.

‘Right to Buy’ was just one example of the Thatcher ‘Me, Me, Me’ generation she spawned.  I suppose it would be naive to image that ‘her’ generation would die out along with her.

On the doorsteps with the YES campaign we have encountered many of Thatcher’s ‘children’.  When we ask them why they intend to vote NO they tell us they are ‘worried about their pension?’, ‘our interest rates might go up’, food in the shops will be dearer’ and they will have to buy a passport.

Aside from the fact that their ‘fears’ are ill founded and a product of their own gullibility.  They are prepared to believe politicians that have lied to them all their lives.

In truth, they don’t actually believe them – I say they chose to say they believe Westminster because they don’t want to own up to their selfish views.

When Scotland wants the chance to run our won country, when Scotland wants to take a stand against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, when Scotland want to take its rightful place in the world, these people say,

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

Well, I don’t want a Scotland populated by Thatcherite clones who intuitively would sacrifice the future of a country and its children while they consider,

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM.

So, on 18 September 2014 I expect Scotland to draw a line under Thatcherism and Thatcher values once and for all and send a message out to the world,

SCOTLAND IS A NATION OF PEOPLE WITH A COLLECTIVE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE WHO ARE NOW READY TO RETAKE THEIR PLACE IN THE WORLD AS AN INDEPENDENT COUNTRY OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE